Kaori watched the girl be nursed back to health over the next month and a half. The girl was a little hard to gauge because of her fur and her extreme difference in size when compared to the elf. This was exactly what Kaori wanted to see. Was there a way for the tiny races to cooperate with larger ones in various settings?
The first bit was very touch and go. The young elf woman had come into her own only a year ago and discovered that she had the ability to heal wounds and injuries. The amount of practice she got as a healer was rather absurd. There was always somebody getting hurt and coming to her to fix them.
Frostbite was a bit more than she was prepared to handle though. When Atha, the shaman of the tribe, found the girl in the forest, she already had third-stage frostbite on both hands and both feet. Since the injury is so slow to set in it’s very hard to treat like a normal wound.
Atha was one of Kaori's favorites. She had known the girl and even talked to her personally since her second day as goddess over this world. Atha was one of the original inhabitants of the world, though she didn’t know that now. She still had vague memories of being visited from time to time by somebody claiming to be the goddess of the world but couldn’t quite pin them down anymore. Little did she realize that the reason was because of the memories put in her head by the deific memory function. Memories of a god or goddess are hard to suppress though.
Kaori had to whisper the solution to the problem in her dreams. If Atha were more powerful as a healer, she might have been able to treat frostbite without problem but not at her current level. The solution was rather distasteful but necessary to treat the necrosis caused by frostbite. The offending digits had to be cut off and healed from there. As Atha wasn’t very powerful, the healing would only regrow about a third of the missing digit at a time.
Atha was too squeamish to perform the next part by herself and one of the hunters stepped in and helped. After recovering her magic, the flesh on the new digit had to be slit open so the rest of the growth could happen. The whole process had taken days and would have killed the girl from shock if she were in a state to feel the pain from it.
The results weren’t perfect but were nearly so. The young scuiringen girl had healthy hands and feet with newly growing-in claws. Her emaciation took longer to deal with. The porridge was a lesson that again came in the form of a dream to the young healer.
Indeed, by the time the girl awoke, she had been eating the porridge long enough that her body knew to salivate over it from the smell. The first time, Atha had made the porridge, she had misunderstood the idea and had cooked it down till it was thick. The girl promptly threw it back up. It took a much closer look at the final product in the next night’s dream before she understood. From there, the seasoning was the next problem.
The girl was finally starting to show a bit of bulk filling out her ribs. She was also finally able to move about a bit. Things looked like they would work out pretty well but there was still the language barrier. Well, deities were allowed to do as they like on their own world within limits.
Kaori had found out firsthand that deities would push their limits if they weren’t monitored closely enough. She had snuck into the deific realm of another deity under the authority of Descartes Malaefecto and found his pantheon doing vile acts to the inhabitants of the world. Descartes hadn’t been pleased to hear about it either.
Kaori wasn’t going to do anything off-putting like that but she was willing to bend her own rules every now and again. If there was a good reason to do it and no real reason not to then she figured why not help out once in a while. This was the kind of time when she was willing to help out. This would let her know the viability of her plan for this world overall.
In the system creation dimension
Kaori was looking at a line of the wording for the implementation of the system. She reread the line three times to make sure. This was something Rocell had come across and brought to her. There was no doubt about it now, this was the glitch in the system’s programming. Kaori thought about it for a moment and then rewrote the line a couple time.
The first time, Pross and Einoro were both about to object to the wording but Kaori caught the mistake faster. The second time, all four of her helpers looked at the line critically before Belle pointed out that it didn’t quite sound like it would read the way Kaori meant it to.
Pross then asked why it had to be done in one line and Kaori did a literal facepalm. After writing it as three lines the first time, they again all looked at the offending wording. The wording of a soul contract had to be absolute lest a person twist the wording and corrupt the meaning. Even for something as simple as who could bestow and look at the system windows, a flaw could be an exploit.
Rocell suggested that two of the sentences could be combined and the meaning would be stronger. Kaori corrected the section and everyone read and re-read the lines. They looked at them in line with the sentences preceding and following the two lines and nobody could find any error with the wording this time.
Kaori then handed the finished contract template to a waiting lesser god and he immediately summoned one of the red ogre tribe he was over. When he went to offer the contract to the ogre’s soul, there was none of the dissonance that there had been before.
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Kaori posted the contract to the Deific Network through her PDI and stored it in the special projects folder. She typed a summons to all the deities and helpers in the side dimension set up for the system’s creation. A few seconds later, every one of the beings in the dimension were gathered to hear what she had to say. “As of just a moment ago, the system should be ready for the second round of testing. I need everyone here to summon various mortals and offer their souls the contract. Don’t initiate the final bestowment, just the offer. If there are no more snags in that part, we can proceed to offer it to the entire populace next.”
There was a pregnant pause of bated breath before everyone present began cheering with jubilation. This was the culmination of months of work for the whole lot of them and they had been so dejected when the first beta-test had failed. It was odd for Kaori to think that in just this short time all of these people that had never heard of programming had just come to accept the weird terminology used by her to describe these processes.
With a nod of her head, the entire group broke up and began summoning various sentient beings. Each one of the people being summoned would arrive in a softly glowing whitish cylinder of light and would be standing perfectly still. Each of the deities present would offer the contract to the being in the cylinder and the ethereal blue contract would turn into a shimmering gold phantom of a scroll or a set of stone tablets. Some of the deities offered the contract in the form of scrolls made of wooden slips while others offered it in a standard book form.
Whatever the form that the deity preferred to use, the contracts all seemed to be turning gold. That meant that each of them were being accepted in their totality by each of the summoned souls. Once the soul had accepted the terms of the contract, the deity would unsummon them without imprinting the contract.
A few moments later, Kaori had her answer, complete success! They could now begin the mass introduction of the system on her planet and then it was on to the next stage. Once they had the system in place, the rest of the deities under the direction of Lethris and Foglat could do the rest. Kaori had seen the process for summing up the totality of a skill set and encapsulating it into a power that could be shared.
They had then made that the basis for the leveling portion of the system. The baseline would always be absolute zero and everyone had every skill in the system at level zero. That level wasn’t visible in the system window, however. This little trick is what allowed the diversity of skills to be stacked correctly. The skills were already there and no reprogramming was needed if somebody unlocked a skill, it just meant that they got it to level one.
All the new skills that would come later were going to be a little bit of a pain because it would require a system update. That meant that for the first few years, the system would periodically cease to function while the update was being made.
Kaori just hoped that the inhabitants wouldn’t get into any problems from the updates happening. She could see scenarios where people would take advantage of the system being down to do shady things. She decided that system updates would be random, quick, and often. That would minimize the risks far more than making them long and scheduled. If one thing could be counted on, it would be people capitalizing on anything.
Kaori and her four senior gods turned to leave after giving Lethris instructions on how to proceed. Kaori was going to have to hire a bunch of new gods with skills that weren’t yet in the system. She knew that this would need to be done right if it was going up for sale to other deities. She was just in the midst of thinking about how to handle the odd requests for additions to the system that would inevitably be made when Foglat approached her.
“Great Fujiwara-sama, I have a request if you are in a position to hear me out.” He then bowed low to her. Kaori had never told any of her deities to bow to her nor had she explained to any of them that this was something she brought from her culture. Somehow, they all began to adopt the practice around her and she suspected that her twelve senior deities that came here with her had something to do with it.
She considered what she wanted to do so badly but gave up and just decided to hear him out. “Go ahead. I can’t say I’ll grant it before I hear what it is but I will at least hear you out. Also, drop the long honorifics, okay?”
Foglat nodded quickly to the head goddess’ request. He could feel the heat creeping into his cheeks as he wrung his wrinkly hands. What he was about to propose was the very thing that got him banished from the afterlife of his deity when he was a mortal man. “Kaori-sama, I would like to pursue the idea of making good aligned undead. I feel that I almost had the spell right when I was alive and I’m sure that it could be much better done as a god. If you would…”
He cut off at Kaori’s upturned-hand gesture and waited. She had a look of concentration before checking her PDI for a moment. “Right now, we don’t even have the undead monsters purchased. That’s quite the oversight! I don’t mind you working on that project but I will want you to work diligently with Lethris to finish this project first. This is a higher priority than a new type of monster.”
“I’m not saying that I don’t support your project though. I even have a suggestion or two. Firstly, the alignment for undead can be good, bad, or neutral. The lich counterparts for those might be saints for the good undead and sages for the neutral ones. You will have to figure out a huge set of systems for implementing these new undead though.”
“Once this project is finished or at least the largest portion of the main skills, you and Lethris can come to me and we will work on that a bit. Mind you, it’s going to be a big deal because we will have to introduce undeath to the planet as a whole since we didn’t have that in place before the restart. That means that there is no history of undead on the planet at all. All things considered; this will be another equally big project but I’m going to be mostly hands-off. This will be your project.”
As Kaori left the dimension and the wizened old god behind, she could hear him muttering happily to himself. She could see this becoming a trend. How many new things was she or one of her underlings going to introduce to the universe at large through the catalog? Already she could tell that Descartes saw her as a golden Buddha but perhaps she was going a bit too fast.
Kaori set the thought aside for a later date and changed gears mentally. She was going back down to merge with her other instance in watching the Scuiringen girl. This was a critical time for this. She was going to include the omniglot skill in everyone’s system for the first year of the system to encourage cooperation. She needed to be down on the surface at the time the system was implemented to see how it was taken by the residents of the world.